Net neutrality isn't about who owns the internet or who decides to turn it off. It's about fairness in it's quality and distribution, I say. Important political and financial figures are start to becoming afraid of the internet. How? People now are informed on things that matter the most that before were kept local or secret.
The information age is defined so by having people sharing and creating contents on a world-wide scale, but consequences are hurting lawmakers and corporations.
Since internet is a domain of the United State, politicians in Washington are feeling the heat and their personal agendas is crumbling. What happens is that laws are being created to limit the content of the net along with the freedom to information.
It is scary how influential are providers such AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, for example. Their work at lobbying senators is somehow successful into turning the web into a filtered content media apparatus. Remember what happened in Australia? Government wanted to apply a huge censorship system cut and edit information on the ground of protecting people using the terrorism/child pornography scapegoat. Those two items are easy to pressure through all the news channels making citizens believe they are being protected when in fact there is more to it.
Another clear example is the latest case for Wikileaks and the publishing of the 92,000 documents coming from military intelligence. It came out that big governments did wrong and are afraid this will translate into a domino effect where the truth can be exposed. Allegation of a wrong war in Iraq are the tip of the iceberg where many high profile politicians can loose more than their job, and all this because information is being made public.
Restricting contents is a move where only few will benefit and where many won't. But there are aspects of the net neutrality that many people do not know because they are being kept away from it. According to an article from the New York Times there are talks between Google and phone carrier Verizon to charge costumer for the search engine's traffic and it's associated website like Youtube. Also the Business Journal reports something similar.
This issue was born upon the problematic that some ISP are having with the increasing demand for a faster internet. Youtube streams million of videos on a daily basis around the world and ISP are having hard times keeping up with the bandwidth request. We don't live anymore in a web system made of just text pages and HTML documents. It's the web 2.0 and we have been for quite sometime. Servie providers are in a state of denial over the expansion of the internet and do not want to invest in better infrastructures not for a lack of money, but because they are stingy.
Some providers in north America set caps over data stream to your house and if you want more internet speed you must pay and get a new contract and pay more to increase the capacity.
However Google officially denied that any talk is taking place and wants accessibility for everyone, but there is a fear that a tier-system will take place eventually in a near future.
What is a tear-system? It would work like TV cable where you pay for packages according to what content you want to access. For example you will pay a basic package for websites like Yahoo, Hotmail, Reddit or Gmail. Then, if you want to use Facebook, Flickr or Ebay on top of the basic you will be charged more. Finally, if you want to add Youtube, Vimeo, Skype and online gaming your bill will be way heavier than what you're paying now on a monthly basis.
Is net neutrality important? Yes, because ISP are just providers and not content-filters tools that can ask you money whenever they feel like. Europe and north America are behind updating their broadband access and coverage compared to countries like Japan and South Korea where DSL speed is 5-10 times faster and optic fiber is somewhat 30 times faster.
US senator Al Franken stated in a CNN interview that net neutrality is essential like free speech and it should be considered to in order to grant a free flow of the information. It's also essential that we do not fall for dirty tricks from politicians. Many of them are too old and stubborn to adapt to new technologies and are afraid that change will dethrone them. Imagine the post office charging you money when you subscribe to one or more newspaper-magazine at your address. How silly would that be? Would an international currier stop working because they are delivering too much? Most likely no and they would probably expand their fleet to keep up with the demand. So why can't ISP build more or better infrastructures? Many of them pocketed money from the US government promising a wider and faster network, but that never happened.
It's important to keep both eyes on matter that are very close to us before someone else makes important decision where we should have a say.
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